Reading Matters: Everyone’s A Critic

The Conversation

Myke Bartlett, Alison Croggon and Morris Gleitzman sat down with Annabel Astbury (Head of Digital Education at the ABC) to discuss the theme ‘Everyone’s a Critic’.

The conversation began with a question regarding creative versus emotional ownership. Is your readership audience entitled to an equal share in your character? One the one hand the author wrote the character. Every action and word they utter is a product of the author’s imagination. The character wouldn’t exist without the author. However in terms of having a character ‘live on’ past the books last page… well that’s all the reader. That’s their imagination and creativity. It’s an interesting, symbiotic relationship. Myke Bartlett spoke of an experience early on in his writing career. He was writing a chapter a week, podcasting the chapter to his audience and asking for feedback and comments that would then feed in to next week’s chapter. It changed the traditional solitary novel writing experience to a community project. The novel was shaped by his creative interpretation of the readers ideas. Fan Fiction feeds in to this idea of ‘attraction’ and brings up an interesting conundrum in the creative versus emotional ownership debate. The audience is taking an established character and extending the story in which they live in. Moving on from ownership debate was a question about the representation of YA in mainstream media. Sadly we were all unanimous in our agreement that YA doesn’t get much mainstream media play. What about an online presence? Does this make up for the lack of mainstream media? While blogs have allowed readers a forum to interact with books, authors and other readers like never before, it has had a detrimental effect on professional literary criticism. There’s a trend of making the professional literary critic an undervalued commodity when up against the vast and endless online reviewing sphere. Alison Croggon strongly believes professional literary criticism has contributed to the ‘cultural conversation’ in Australia. Morris Gleitzman would rather read a well thought out critical review of his book, rather than a polite generic sentence in the mainstream press. There was overall an agreement that criticism is necessary, but that the self-critic is the strongest and best voice to listen to.